Exploding Blog Page Rank Misconceptions by Recommending a New Page Ranking System

Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another, one metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be used to describe them. And also, I cannot assume that the ways I read blogs is the same as everyone else, so I’d rather have a community algorithm in the sense that the community has commented on the weight of some metrics over others within the algorithm, and not just assume that the ways I or others weight these gestures in our blog search are correct for everyone.

A new metric could balance links with these other representations of activity (not all are available, but if we want them, we should ask tool builders and data aggregators to get these kinds of information for us). Note that many of these are subject to spam, and spam controls for them are implemented by the companies that track this stuff. Using a metric that incorporates those will require additional spam controls.

So then.. we talked about how important those kinds of information are us as we evaluate a blog or post, and then whether or not there was a number associated with that particular information or a ratio between two sorts of information that might be interesting, and whether it’s information we have, and what we might do with it.

PR or “PageRank” is a trademarked system Google uses to rank pages within search results and within the indexed sites and pages on the web for marketing and advertising purposes. Google is not the only search engine or directory in the world and not everyone uses it. Google has also repeatedly messed with the algorithm that generates a ranking for a page or site, resetting quality content providers to zero and messing with the numbers. With the increased use of AJAX, which changes the meaning of pageviews and traffic on a site, and a lot of other reasons, PageRank is becoming more and more unimportant and incorrect when evaluating the quality of a site.

This is still the early days of search engine rankings, and Google has been on the right side of the process, but things have to change and there will be bumps in the road. If you set your focus on PageRank, you are missing out on much better ways of site evaluation and judgment.

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[…] The public release of the Google search algorithm patents helped reveal even more about the mysteries of how Google ranks web pages and I wrote about those in “Google Page Rank Uses Domain Age to Score”, “Next Generation Search Engine Results May Include Profiling”, “Exploding Blog Page Rank Misconceptions by Recommending a New Page Ranking System”, and “Google Patent News You Need To Know”. The issue of profiling by search engines is one that will rage on for a long time, but it’s already here. Search engines are great record keepers, evaluating how you search, what you search, and when you search, and they are already pushing content towards you, based on your personal history of searching. There will be more on this, so stay tuned. […]